The number of VC-backed companies valued at $1B or more created by quarter has dropped off a cliff as private markets cool off.

Where is this data coming from?

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Where is this data coming from?

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After the mid-2015 peak when as many as two dozen unicorns were birthed every three months, unicorn creation has fallen back to earth. This tracks overall investment trends for venture capital-backed private companies, for which funding and deals also retreated in the past two quarters.

Using CB Insights data to dig into unicorn trends, we found only 5 new VC-backed unicorns emerged in Q1’16, including Japan-based e-commerce marketplace Mercari and Chicago-based enterprise-collaboration platform Anaplan. Compare this pace to the peak of the unicorn frenzy in Q2’15 and Q3’15 when 24 and 25 new $1B+ companies were created, respectively.

The last quarter this few VC-backed unicorns were created was Q4’13, over two years ago (Snapchat emerged as a unicorn in that quarter, as did MongoDB).

In total, there are 166 unicorn companies globally, according to our real-time Unicorn Tracker (although this number includes companies without VC backers).